


Spreadsheets and Secrets

by the_empty_man



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: But also bits of angst, Gen, Humour, I just like writing about the characters from an external perspective, Minkowski tries to get a boring normal job after the hell of the Hephaestus, Post-Canon, back on earth, it will be very clear that I don't know what people who work in offices actually do, just to be clear Minkowski is going by Emma, results are mixed, whilst in hiding the crew have adopted aliases that match the first names of their actors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:39:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28893042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_empty_man/pseuds/the_empty_man
Summary: Renée Minkowski has a new name and a new job. Her colleagues are more than a little curious about their boss.Featuring the HMS Tight Ship, alien intruders, Mickey Mouse, the inner workings of the illuminati, the supply closet and weird coincidences.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel & Renée Minkowski, Renee Minkowski & OCs
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30





	Spreadsheets and Secrets

To put it politely, no one at Peterson Inc. really liked Emma Kalinski at first. Sarah seen several office managers come and go, but her first impression of Emma was that she would be the most tiresome team leader they’d ever had. 

For starters, Emma had introduced herself by making an incredibly long and dull speech about how hard they were all going to work. As she listened to the speech, Sarah thought that there was something caricturish about Emma, something ridiculous about the way she declared the seriousness of her leadership and waved the company policy document in her new colleagues’ faces. Her military bearing and authoritarian manner were made all the more comical by her short stature. When Emma said, without a trace of irony, "I'm going to warn you now, I run a pretty tight ship," Sarah heard someone suppress a snort of laughter.

"Who says stuff like that?" Alan exclaimed as soon as Emma had left. "We're a load of bored office-workers, not a platoon of Navy Seals, for God's sake!"

Under the previous (extremely lax) team leader, practical jokes had been a regular feature of office life, mostly initiated by Gabriel, the self-proclaimed office joker. When Sarah warned him that goofing off would be less of a good plan with this robotic-seeming woman in charge, he groaned.

“Don’t worry, I’ll stay on the right side of HMS Tight Ship,” he told her, rolling his eyes. She would miss the pranks, but it was better than him getting sacked.

***

After a week or so, Sarah decided that she’d been too hasty in her dislike of their new team leader. She began to question her initial assessment of the woman when, a few days after she’d started, Emma brought in a homemade cake for Alan's birthday. It tasted disgusting, but the thought was there. None of their previous team leaders had ever done that. Maybe Emma was more personable and less robotic than her introductory speech had suggested. Sarah noticed the almost aggressive frequency with which she complimented people's work, and how she hummed showtunes while she worked. She even responded good-naturedly to the small pranks Gabriel could not resist playing.

There was a photo on Emma’s desk of herself in front of the Disneyland castle with her arms slung round a gangly man, who was wearing Mickey Mouse merchandise from head-to-toe, and a muscular woman, who was holding a stick of candyfloss with one hand and making bunny ears over Emma's head with the other. All three of them were grinning broadly. Emma's casual smile in that photo belied her uptight office manner.

Perhaps it was that photo. Perhaps it was the personal interest Emma showed in every member of the team, remembering everyone’s weekend plans and the names of their family members. Perhaps it was the way she shrugged off, or conveniently failed to hear, all personal questions directed at her. Perhaps it was the general hard-to-pinpoint air of mystery around her. At any rate, Sarah couldn’t help but be extremely curious about her boss’ personal life. She wasn’t the only one either.

One Friday night, a few of them went to a nearby bar for drinks after work and they somehow fell to wondering about Emma. It was so difficult, but fascinating, to try and imagine her beyond the confines of the office walls. Alan reported asking Emma where she’d worked before Peterson Inc and receiving a very cryptic answer.

"She said she didn’t want to talk about it. That it had been a difficult time. And she was just relieved to be back in New York." Alan smiled with gratification at the intrigued reaction this morsel of information received. The rest of that night, which turned out to be a rather late and drunken one, was dedicated to speculation about this ‘difficult time’ in Emma’s life. The theories became more detailed and less believable as the evening wore on. People suggested illness, family tragedy, homelessness, failed romance, prison and even espionage. Of course, the most outrageous theories, such as the idea that Emma had been a mafia boss, came from Gabriel. Sarah was naturally sceptical of his claims, since he had attempted to describe the inner workings of the illuminati to everyone in the office. She enjoyed the stimulating discussion of what illegal occupations Emma would be most suited to, but she didn’t take it seriously.

***

Unfortunately, it seemed Gabriel did take it seriously. A couple of months after Emma had started at Peterson, he came into the office bouncing with excitement and slapped a photo down onto Sarah’s desk.

"Who do you suppose that is?" he asked triumphantly, gesturing at the photo.

"I don't know..." She peered reluctantly down at the picture, not expecting to recognize it, but thinking she might as well humour him. It wasn’t the first time he’d brought her ‘evidence’ of some far-fetched conspiracy. "Oh, it's Emma!" she exclaimed. The woman in the photo was wearing a space suit, had her hair in a long plait rather than a pixie cut, and had no wrinkles, as opposed to Emma's prematurely lined face. But it did look like the same person.

"That is Lieutenant Commander Renée Minkowski, who was reported dead in a Goddard Futuristics shuttle crash four years ago," Gabriel said with a dramatic flourish.

"Oh, for God's sake, Gabriel...” Sarah gave an exasperated sigh. “Is this what you do when you're meant to be working?"

“You remember when I was telling you all about how Goddard is murdering people to cover up their shady research while they’re looking for aliens?” Gabriel asked. Sarah nodded reluctantly. She tuned his ramblings out a lot of the time, but she remembered that one because it had just seemed so off the wall. “I realised last night that I recognised Emma from when I was looking into Goddard. Her photo’s right there in the articles about the Hephaestus mission!”

“You know all that stuff we said at the bar was just a bit of fun, right?” Sarah said, thinking it was worth trying to reason with him. “None of us actually think Emma is a mobster or an escaped convict or an ex-astronaut…” Gabriel gave her an affronted look.

"This isn’t just a bit of fun!” he insisted. “Don’t you see? I've solved the mystery about what Emma was doing before she came here. Commander Minkowski didn't die in that crash, because she's working here!" His excited voice built towards a crescendo. Sarah worried that everyone in the office would overhear. She gestured for him to keep it down, but he didn’t appear to notice. "So, either Emma faked her own death and got back from space undetected, or Goddard Futuristics have been lying to the public and covering-up some serious shit!"

"Gabriel, it's just a weird coincidence,” Sarah said. “If I trawled the internet hard enough, I could probably find a dead astronaut who looked like you. Fortunately, I've got better things to do with my time." She turned back to her computer and started typing very pointedly, pretending to concentrate on her spreadsheet. Gabriel waved the photo between her face and the screen, but she ignored him.

“Just you wait,” he said, determined. “I’ll find proof you can’t ignore!”

***

Sarah told herself that Gabriel was just talking amusing nonsense as usual, but she couldn’t put that dead astronaut’s uncanny resemblance to their team leader out of her mind. Emma was definitely odd, and not just in a manager-on-a-power-trip way. Whenever the phone rang, she jumped up like someone ready to fight an attacker. She dropped things weirdly often, as if she sometimes forgot about gravity. She didn’t respond immediately when people called her name, almost as if it wasn’t her real one. Her hands sometimes shook, and she had strange scars on her arms. She sometimes sat for hours staring into the distance and taking deep breaths, as if trying to stop herself hyperventilating. And Sarah was sure she’d heard Emma crying in the toilets.

Emma Kalinski had definitely been through some shit, but that didn’t mean it made sense to start claiming she’d been to space. That was what Emma said to Gabriel, at any rate, but she was increasingly less sure that she believed it herself.

***

Sarah was preoccupied with an important report, when the man from Emma’s Disneyland picture bounced into the office. Sarah wasn’t sure she’d ever encountered someone so jittery in her life. On discovering that Emma was out in a meeting, he passed the time by zigzagging round the office, peering excitedly at everyone’s desks, picking items up to examine them and generally making himself a bit of a nuisance. He investigated Sarah’s stapler as though he’d never seen one before and she realised she probably ought to intervene before he stapled his finger. She took it off him and his face fell, simultaneously disappointed and apologetic.

“So, you’ve come to see Emma?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he replied, now rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. “She’s my friend. My housemate, actually.” Sarah raised her eyebrows involuntarily. Despite the evidence of that photo, his odd excitable man was the last person she would have expected to be a close friend of the straight-laced, no-nonsense Emma. After knowing him for less than five minutes, Sarah thought she would go insane if she had to share a house with him.

Thinking that chatting with him might reveal some facts about Emma’s life beyond the office, Sarah introduced herself.

“Oh, I’m…” he paused, as if trying to remember. “Zach. Zach Towers.” He grinned like he’d made a joke.

“How did you meet Emma?”

“At work.” His eyes were roving all over the office as he spoke. He seemed fascinated by the whole place. “She was _my_ boss too, funnily enough.” Sarah tried to picture Emma becoming good enough friends with a subordinate to move in with them, but it seemed almost too big a stretch for her imagination to handle. She suspected there was more to this story, but at that moment, Emma came back from her meeting.

On seeing Zach, Emma immediately seized him in a tight hug. When she drew back, she asked him what the hell he was doing there. Zach started babbling about being bored and having an argument with someone called Hera and wanting to see where she worked. Emma listened patiently, a look of affection on her face, before suggesting that she get him some coffee. As Emma led him out of the office, Sarah heard Zach pleading about whether they could watch Harry Potter that evening.

***

Sarah liked to get to the office early to settle in before anyone else. So she immediately knew that something was up when she encountered Gabriel waiting for her by the office door as she arrived. He was never on time, let alone early. He looked somewhat sleep-deprived but extremely excited.

“Sarah!” he greeted her victoriously. “I found proof!”

“Proof of what?” she asked, although there was a sinking feeling in her chest that knew exactly what this was about.

"Let me show you," he said, dragging her into the supply closet. With some difficulty, he reached into the small gap behind the cabinet and brought out a flat parcel that he must have hidden there. When he took off its covering, it was revealed to be a large corkboard, covered in photographs, newspaper clippings and handwritten notes.

"Oh my god, you made a literal conspiracy board?" Sarah said in disbelief. "This is why you keep disappearing to the supply closet? I thought you must be having a secret work romance with someone from another department!"  
Gabriel ignored her; he was concentrating on propping the corkboard up on the middle shelves so that the two of them could view it clearly. He grabbed hold of a presentation pointer stick and began a speech that he had clearly prepared in advance.

"Once I knew that Emma was Renée Minkowski" - he pointed to her astronaut portrait and a news clipping - "I decided to see if I could track down her friends" - Gabriel used the stick to tap a photocopy of the Disneyland picture from Emma's desk.

"Gabriel, you can't just go nicking people's private mementos," Sarah interrupted.

"I know, I shouldn't really have done it, but I needed that picture for comparison. Because Zach Towers" - he pointed to the man in Emma's picture - "is really Officer Douglas Eiffel" - he pointed to another media portrait of a Goddard astronaut. The similarly with ‘Zach Towers’ was striking, through the man in the picture was less gaunt and more red-faced. "Eiffel was supposedly on the shuttle with Minkowski when it crashed,” Gabriel told Sarah. She remembered how Zach had said that he met Emma at work and that she’d been his boss. If Gabriel’s theory was true, that wouldn’t have been a lie.

"I'm not sure it's the same person...” Sarah said tentatively. The speculation felt less amusing now, and much more real, than it had in the bar a few weeks ago. One lookalike was unlikely, two lookalikes living together was extremely improbable.

"If that's not enough for you…" He pointed at the other woman in Emma's picture, then at a newspaper clipping containing an image of (what appeared to be) the same woman. "Emma's other friend was a little harder to track down, but I found her. Captain Isabel Lovelace was on an earlier Goddard mission to the other two, but is also meant to have died in an accident."

Sarah couldn't deny that the evidence was quite compelling. It seemed nearly impossible that three people who all looked exactly like dead Goddard astronauts would just happen to know each other.

“In case you haven't noticed, neither Renée or her friends are dead," she said, as a final attempt at maintaining her scepticism.

“That’s my whole point! That’s why this is a massive deal!” There was a manic look in Gabriel’s eyes that Sarah recognised and did not like one bit. He’d had a similar expression just before he’d attempted to unmask the Deputy CEO as an alien intruder. He’d been fortunate that the Deputy CEO had a bizarre sense of humour, or Gabriel would’ve been out of a job. Sarah doubted that Emma would be quite as amused.

"Gabriel, don't you dare talk to her about it, okay?" she ordered him.

"Why not?" Gabriel said indignantly. "I've uncovered a conspiracy! I should confront her. Find out the truth!"

"No, you shouldn't because,” Emma counted the reasons on her fingers. “a) I don't want you to get sacked. b) I don't want her to know we've been gossiping about her since she arrived. c) If she really is Renée Minkowski, then she must be in hiding for a good reason." She thought of Emma’s shaking hands and occasional red-rimmed eyes. "She seems like a good person. We shouldn't fuck things up for her."

“But I can’t just-"

At that moment, the door to the supply closet opened. And suddenly there was Emma Kalinski, holding a box of stationery. Gabriel tried to hide his conspiracy board, which was unfortunately facing the door, but he wasn't fast enough to stop Emma seeing it. She made a horrible choking gasp, dropped the box with a clatter, and ran off. Sarah jumped over the pens that were rolling all over the floor and sprinted after her. Gabriel followed.

“Emma!” Sarah shouted as they ran out of the office building and onto the street outside. "Emma! We didn't mean any harm!" Emma did not turn around, no matter how many times Sarah called her name.

“Commander Renée Minkowski!” Gabriel yelled. At that, Emma stopped in her tracks and spun around. Sarah and Gabriel ground to a halt in front of her on the pavement.

"For God's sake, don't shout that name," Emma said, her voice full of steel. "Anyone could hear you."

"I'm sorry," Gabriel said. "I wasn't trying to unmask you or anything. I just like solving mysteries."

"Well congratulations, mystery solved," Emma said through gritted teeth. She ran a hand over her face. "Okay, okay, here's what's going to happen. You are going to go back to the office and tell everyone I've gone home because I was ill. You are going to take everything off that corkboard and destroy it. And you are never going to tell anyone about any of this." Sarah and Gabriel both nodded. Then Emma's tone switched from authoritative to desperate. "Please. Please don't tell anyone. It was a miracle that we got away the first time. If they find us again…" she trailed off, shaking her head. "If you could try to limit the office speculation about where I've gone, th-"

"Wait, you're leaving?" Gabriel interrupted.

"I want to trust you both, but I have to protect my crew." Emma's voice was full of determination.

"You don't have to go," Sarah said, realising suddenly that she would miss her. "We promise we won't tell anyone. No one else knows. Your secret's safe."

"I can't afford to take risks with this. Someone else could have seen those pictures. Someone could have heard you discussing it. Hell, I've already been foolish in talking to you for this long." Emma seemed to be readying herself to run.

"Goodbye, then," said Gabriel, sounding disappointed and a tiny bit resentful.

"Good luck," said Sarah, wishing that there was something more she could offer. "Stay safe out there." And then, with a nod, Emma was gone.

***

No one at Peterson Inc. ever saw Emma Kalinski, or Renée Minkowski, or whoever she had been, again after that. The team was told she had "left for personal reasons", but the management did not seem sure of what these reasons were. Sarah tried going to her address but the house seemed to be empty. She helped Gabriel, who only showed a twinge of reluctance, to burn everything from his conspiracy board and wipe the evidence of his research from his computer. They didn't talk about Emma again. Despite having successfully proved a theory for the first time, Gabriel no longer gushed about conspiracies. Sarah did her best to change the subject when her colleagues talked about how weird it was that Emma had never said goodbye. She kept a close eye on news about Goddard Futuristics, but she never saw anything about any supposedly dead ex-astronauts being found alive. She hoped that this was a good sign, that it meant Emma was successfully staying hidden.

Their next officer manager wasn’t nearly as interesting.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I'd love it if you could leave a comment to let me know what you think! Have a good day :)


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